Shaping the Post-COVID World

Contributor(s): Professor G John Ikenberry, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Charles A Kupchan, Professor Ayşe Zarakol | Leading experts on world politics take up these questions and others about the future of the liberal world order.

Contributor(s): Professor Ricky Burdett, Dr Amara Enyia, Tracy Jooste, Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey | Drawing on their research and practice and in conversation with each other, Atlantic Institute’s Leaders in Residence, Amara Enyia and Tracy Jooste, and LSE academics Robtel Neajai Pailey and Ricky Burdett will consider how in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we can not only build back better, but also build differently.

Contributor(s): Dr Annette Zimmermann, Dr Zeynep Pamuk, Professor Jocelyn Maclure, Dr Etienne Brown | Public administrations increasingly use AI to automatise the allocation of public services. Judges use risk-assessment algorithms to determine a person’s eligibility for bail or parole. Social media platforms use AI to optimise content moderation, while political actors can use these platforms to engage in microtargeting and misinformation. And law enforcement agencies can use facial recognition systems and predictive analytics to strengthen surveillance. This new reality requires careful examination: Who should be responsible for selecting principles of AI governance? How can we align the decisions of AI systems with democratic values? Are “black box” algorithms undermining transparency and our capacity to exercise scrutiny over public decisions? Panellists reflect on these and related questions and engage with the audience.

Contributor(s): Lord Malloch-Brown | For decades, democracy and human-rights advocates have assumed that a growing number of governments were embracing democracy, freedom and the international law. Yet today, 38 percent of the world’s population live in countries which are not free – the highest proportion in a quarter of a century. As the enemies of open society further accelerate their attacks, and Ukraine becomes the frontline in a systems-breaking clash between democracy and authoritarianism, where do we turn next in today’s fight for open society?

Contributor(s): Professor Scott Barrett | This keynote lecture explains: why, despite thirty years of diplomatic effort, global collective action on climate change has failed; how climate diplomacy can be made more effective; and what past and ongoing diplomatic failures imply for future climate diplomacy.

Contributor(s): Professor Nancy Fraser | In the wake of the perfect storm that is COVID, how can we stop it from cannibalising our whole world?

Contributor(s): Professor Boris Vujcic, Dr Debora Revoltella, Francis Malige, Fokion Karavias, Dr Anthony Bartzokas | What are the forces reshaping finance in South East Europe? What are the lessons learned from the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the prospects for banks during the recovery phase? How technology and nonfinancial corporations are transforming the banking sector? A panel of experts from the region discuss key challenges from the build-up of vulnerabilities, proposals by various institutions for future action and the role that banks and investors could play towards building back better after the pandemic.

Contributor(s): Dr Anthony Masters, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter | Anthony Masters is Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society. David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. They are the authors of COVID by Numbers: making sense of the pandemic with data. Qiwei Yao is Professor in the Department of Statistics at LSE.

Contributor(s): Dr Alina Averchenkova, Professor Barry Buzan, Professor Kathy Hochstetler, Dr Miriam Prys-Hansen, Professor Stacy Vandeveer | Great powers are also great polluters, particularly when it comes to the global greenhouse gas effect. Through the 2015 Paris Agreement and recent international conferences, all major powers - from the United States to China, India, Brazil, Russia and the EU - have committed to bringing greenhouse gas emissions under control and decarbonising their economies by 2050.

Contributor(s): Winnie Byanyima | This event with Winnie Byanyima, the feminist activist who leads the UN’s response to HIV and AIDS and who chairs the People’s Vaccine Alliance for COVID-19, will highlight lessons rooted in ongoing experience from the AIDS response and the commonalities between the two pandemics, as well as learnings from other health crises, to set out an approach that can actually succeed in keeping us all safe. The COVID-19 crisis has alerted world leaders to the urgency of stopping and preventing pandemics, which are recognised as undermining health, stability, and economic progress. But the path on which the world is embarking to overcome pandemics cannot succeed, because it is failing to address their underlying systemic drivers. Inequalities are increasingly preventing overwhelming majorities in most developing countries from accessing COVID-19 vaccines, enabling the pandemic to spread and the virus to mutate. If we end inequalities upfront, we will increase our odds of ending AIDS, ending COVID-19 and winning against future pandemics. But business as usual will fail. In this time of emergency, the only realistic approach is a radical one, the only safe response is to be bold.

Contributor(s): Tim Davie | With constant scrutiny of its public service remit, multiple new entrants in the market and changes in the way audiences consume content, what’s the future of the BBC?

Contributor(s): Professor Luitgard Veraart | Domino effects of losses can bring down entire financial systems with severe knock-on effects on the real economy. This talk considers insights from mathematics to model loss cascades and apply them to recent financial stress events. We live in an interconnected world. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, interconnections affect both our lives and our livelihoods. In this talk, Luitgard Veraart will show how we can use mathematical models to quantify and manage risk arising from interconnections in financial markets. A particular focus will be on systemic risk and financial stability. Examples provided from the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will illustrate how mathematical models can inform the debate on mitigating systemic risk. Meet our speaker and chair Luitgard Veraart is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at LSE. She joined LSE in 2010 after holding positions in the USA and in Germany. She is a co-winner of the 2019 Adams Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for her research in the Mathematics of Networks. Jan van den Heuvel is Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Department of Mathematics at LSE. More about this event The Department of Mathematics (@LSEMaths) is internationally recognised for its teaching and research in the fields of discrete mathematics, game theory, financial mathematics and operations research.

Contributor(s): Professor Winnie Yip, Dr Xuefei Ren, Professor Xiaobo Lü, Bill Bikales | Leading scholars of health policy, development economics, urban governance and public administration will assess the policy agenda of their respective field in relation to the goal of building ‘common prosperity’ recently proposed by the CCP.

Contributor(s): Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh | A moment of change is when circumstances shift quickly. They include life course moments – like becoming a parent or changing careers - and external changes – such as travel disruption or the impact of wider societal disruption. The relationship between moments of change and environmental impact is complex. There are differences across individuals, cultures and society. Professor Whitmarsh will discuss this research, including how this relates to net zero societal change and the COVID-19 pandemic. She will also share her thoughts on implications for policy makers.

Contributor(s): Professor Ha-Joon Chang, Dr Francis Mustapha Kai-Kai, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Waleed Shahid | Ministers and policy influencers from across the world discuss how they are addressing inequality and why we have not seen the scale and speed of progress the pandemic has warranted. Speakers discuss a recent report, From rhetoric to action: Delivering equality and inclusion from the Pathfinders initiative hosted by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, which considers what actually works to address inequality and exclusion in different country settings.

Contributor(s): Steve Baker MP, Professor Paul Dolan, Nancy Hey, Dr Johanna Thoma | These questions are particularly relevant at a time when we start to fully understand the consequences of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on a range of aspects of people’s lives: from mental health to domestic violence, from economic to educational outcomes. A focus on wellbeing can challenge the processes through which different public policy goals have been prioritised.

Contributor(s): Professor Steven Bernstein, Professor Barry Buzan, Dr Robert Falkner, Professor Kathy Hochstetler | Climate change and other environmental threats have moved to the top of the international agenda. All major powers are now committed to fighting global warming and ensuring environmental sustainability. But it has not always been thus. How did the society of states come to accept a responsibility for the global environment? And how deeply committed are states to safeguarding the planet?

Contributor(s): Professor Claudia Goldin, Professor Jane Humphries, Dr Berkay Ozcan, Dr Iva Tasseva | Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children; how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Contributor(s): Professor Lord Stern | Nicholas Stern (@lordstern1) is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was knighted for services to economics in 2004, made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007, and appointed Companion of Honour for services to economics, international relations and tackling climate change in 2017. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Luitgard Veraart | This talk explains insights from mathematics to model loss cascades and apply them to recent financial stress events.